Utah Vote Rejects Parts of Education Law

By SAM DILLON

Published: April 20, 2005

In a stinging rebuke of President Bush's signature education law, the Republican-dominated Utah Legislature on Tuesday passed a bill that orders state officials to ignore provisions of the federal law that conflict with Utah's education goals or that require state financing.

The bill is the most explicit legislative challenge to the federal law by a state, and its passage marked the collapse of a 15-month lobbying effort against it by the Bush administration.

Federal officials fear Utah's action could embolden other states to resist what many states consider intrusive or unfunded provisions of the federal law, known as No Child Left Behind.

Utah's action comes as a federal-state conflict over the education law appears to be escalating. The attorney general of Connecticut has announced that he will sue the Department of Education over the law's finances, Texas is in open defiance of a federal ruling on testing disabled children and many state legislatures have protested various provisions of the federal law, which has required a sweeping expansion of standardized testing.

The 29-member Senate passed the bill on a vote of 25 to 3, with one absence, hours after the Utah House, which has 75 members, approved it 66 to 7. Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., a Republican, has said he intends to sign it.

Several lawmakers said in the debates on Tuesday that they admired Mr. Bush, but they described the 1,000-page federal education law that he signed in January 2002 as an unconstitutional expansion of the federal role in education.

Representative Margaret Dayton, the Republican state representative who wrote the Utah bill, said she had worded it to assert Utah's right to control local schools without jeopardizing the state's federal education financing.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings warned in a letter to Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah on Monday, however, that depending on how the state were to apply the bill's provisions, the Department of Education might withhold $76 million of the $107 million that Utah receives in federal education money. Several lawmakers said the secretary's letter seemed to be a threat.

''I don't like to be threatened,'' said Representative Steven R. Mascaro, a real estate developer from a Salt Lake City suburb. ''I wish they'd take the stinking money and go back to Washington.''

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment.

The bill orders Utah educators to ''provide first priority to meeting state goals'' when those conflict with the federal law and to spend as little state money as possible to comply with the federal law's testing and other programs. It also requires the state superintendent of public instruction to ''lobby federal education officials for relief from the provisions'' of the law.

Amid a series of speeches lashing the federal law, several lawmakers from each party nonetheless praised one of its central provisions, which requires that student performance data be reported separately in each school for all racial, ethnic and other groups. That requirement allows educators and parents to identify low-achieving students even in schools whose overall test scores look impressive.

The Utah House approved an identical bill in February by a unanimous vote, but after lobbying by Washington officials, Mr. Huntsman persuaded the Senate to postpone its vote until a special session. At that time, Ms. Spellings congratulated legislators for making ''the right decision for the state's students by deciding to continue to work with us, instead of working at cross-purposes.''

In behind-the-scenes negotiations with Utah officials in recent weeks, federal officials provided new flexibility to Utah on how it determines whether its teachers are sufficiently certified. But Utah officials had also sought permission to use the state's own fledgling school accountability system instead of the system outlined in the federal law.

Utah's education superintendent, Patti Harrington, an outspoken critic of the federal law, said Washington had never seemed close to granting that request.

Until very recently, virtually every political force in Utah, from the ultra-conservative Eagle Forum to the main teachers union, had supported the Utah bill. But earlier this month a coalition of Hispanic, African-American and other educators voiced concerns that the legislature's effort to sidestep provisions of the federal law might allow minority students to fall through the cracks.

Duane E. Bourdeaux, a Democrat, who is Utah's only African-American state representative, voted in favor of the bill in February, and sponsored an amendment on Tuesday ordering Utah educators to put the federal law into effect in a way that guarantees that student achievement data will continue to be reported separately for each racial and other group.

''There are a lot of problems with No Child Left Behind, but for the first time the federal government has taken a stand to say, 'We have an achievement gap that needs to be dealt with,''' Mr. Bourdeaux said. His amendment was defeated.

The Utah bill leans heavily for its rationale on a provision in the federal education law that Republican congressmen during the first years of the Clinton administration, which forbids federal officials from requiring states to spend their own money to enact the policies outlined in the law.